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Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with 100 trillion of his closest microbial friends — a close-knit, symbiotic community comprising several thousand species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. In a similarly collaborative fashion, all of Dave’s writing is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).

I get a feeling like that too sometimes. Weeding feels different than pruning for me. I especially like the second stanza and those consonants, the brittleness they bring. I am enjoying Odes to Tools, by the way. Ordered it new from Amazon.

Thanks, Joan. The earth will win in the end, but if past mass extinctions are any guide, it may take as long as 10 million years to regain the same degree of biological diversity and ecosystem resilience it had before humans went viral.

Yes, as Jean says in the first comment, it has a gentle flow. That sense of the rhythm of the work. Grasp and pull and a soft avalanche of soil giving way. I like the sense of ease in that. Weeding can be relaxing when you’re not having to fight, and the ground willingly yields the invading crop.

But here in Wales we must wait for the next rain… whenever that may be… because right now the earth is concrete hard and the weeds will resist or snap off at the ground.

Good one, Dave! The poem captures in simple language a human experience ten thousand years old. The reference to your mortality after referring to the mortality of weeds on weeding day is particularly effective, as others have remarked. A very satisfying poem, this coming from someone who has spent hundreds of hours weeding over the years.

I’m reminded of Henry Thoreau’s passage in Walden concerning his thoughts about weeding his bean-field: “Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.”

That was a lovely weed metaphor from Walden, Larry : “Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.”

It reminded me of Dave’s Scythes poem where the Scythes have flashbacks of harvesting. I’m assuming these ‘crowds’ are wheat but in my patch, the ‘crowds’ are weed grasses, which do not respond to a scythe. Only yanking.

Do you remember?
they murmur, how
the crowds
would lose their heads
& stand like soldiers,
stiff, when the wind
moved through?